Many consumer devices are adapted to utilize Wi-Fi or other wireless networking technologies to connect to the Internet. Thus, in both home and enterprise network installations, Wireless LAN (WLAN) conditions play an important role in the user experience. While advancements are continuously being made in the Wi-Fi protocols and devices to support higher data rates, poor WLAN setup and unanticipated conditions in the environment can lead to significant and persistent performance degradation and user dissatisfaction. With ever increasing speeds being delivered by broadband service providers, and increased use of Wi-Fi for the “last hop” to user devices, more situations are being encountered where a WLAN is acting as a bottleneck. Thus, although Wi-Fi standards have evolved to theoretically deliver high maximum data rates (in some cases, upwards of 1 Gbps), poor placement of devices, misconfiguration of devices, and environmental issues can substantially reduce throughput and reliability in practice. Plus, a client device may fail to support a newer Wi-Fi standard used by a router; the consequences of this may include the client device not utilizing all of a router's capabilities, or other client devices experiencing reduced performance. Additionally, a client device may, even when the client device supports the appropriate Wi-Fi standard and link conditions are good, experience poor performance due to the client device having limited CPU or memory resources which become overloaded and cause received data to be consumed slowly. Apart from identifying when a WLAN is acting as a bottleneck, it is also important to identify what is causing degradation for a WLAN, so that effective actions can be taken to alleviate the problem.
With the ubiquitous use of Wi-Fi wireless networking in home and business environments, diagnosing performance bottlenecks in a Wireless LAN (WLAN) is becoming an important task. Although there are devices and tools that collect a wide range of statistics to identify the health of the Wi-Fi channel, the link quality to various devices, and overall WLAN health as well, such devices and tools often rely on specialized hardware. For home area networks, although some Wi-Fi routers may measure some basic Wi-Fi link quality metrics, such as link quality, transmit rate, and error rate, they only give an indication of the current WLAN health and do not provide enough information to identify some of the commonly experienced problems, generally do not provide meaningful summaries for end users, or remedies for problems. There are enterprise-grade Wi-Fi Access Points (APs) and routers that collect a variety of Layer-1 and Layer-2 statistics. However, such statistics are measured, stored, and presented in a manner directed towards individuals with the skills and expertise or network admins and Wi-Fi-domain experts, and are not summarized and presented in a way useful to a layman. Additionally, such hardware does not provide an algorithmic way of identifying the presence of, main causes of, and solutions for performance bottlenecks.
For broadband service providers (which may also be referred to as “ISPs” (Internet service providers), the problem of troubleshooting performance issues is both difficult and important. The problem is difficult because in many configurations customers provide their own WLAN hardware, which usually is not directly accessible to or configurable by a broadband service provider. In such configurations, Layer-1 and Layer-2 statistics for a WLAN are generally not available. The problem is also important, as the broadband service provider is often one of the first places a customer contacts when experiencing networking issues, even if such issues arise from WLAN hardware neither provided by nor under the control of the broadband service provider. Thus, it is very useful for a broadband service provider to be able to make use of automated wireless access point diagnostic systems that are effective across many of the varied WLAN configurations presented across customers.